Barack Obama arrived in Washington and set the year's agenda--his Inauguration, a fiscal stimulus, the bailout of Wall Street banks and Detroit automakers, his Supreme Court pick, the yearlong healthcare reform debate.

After the torpor of the lame duck years of George Bush, the White House beat regained top spot and ABC's Jake Tapper was the busiest correspondent. Such a focus on domestic politics (3533 min v 3260 in 2001, 3631 in 1993) is par for a President's first year--slightly more than Bush's, slightly less than Bill Clinton's.

As the recession dragged on, the Economy (2785 min v 2767 in 2008) again attracted record attention. Also setting records was the Health beat (1883 min v a previous high of 1471 in 1993, the year of Hillarycare), since reform politics coupled with an influenza pandemic. NBC, led by Robert Bazell, spent most time on public health anxieties about the H1N1 swine 'flu virus, an overreaction since the outbreak turned out to be mild.

The stench of stolen elections set the agenda overseas. In Iran, the opposition took to the streets to protest corrupt clerics; in Afghanistan, the United States dispatched troop reinforcements to prop up Hamid Karzai's corrupt regime. After seven years, Afghanistan has finally supplanted Iraq as the networks' hot spot.

CBS covered Afghanistan most heavily with its Road Ahead series yet its hard-news reputation was undermined by a decision to treat pop singer Michael Jackson's untimely death as a major story.

The Most Newsworthy Woman of the Year Sonia Sotomayor; the Man, Stanley McChrystal, who has an Afghanistan Plan.

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Each day, Andrew Tyndall blogs the three newscasts. He has been monitoring
television news for 20 years. He claims to be the only person on the planet
who has personally watched every single weekday network nightly newscast
since the summer of 1987. Other people go on vacation: he records them all
and logs the news he missed into his database when he returns.